Talk and the Economy

In Saturday’s Times, behavioral economist Robert Shiller argued that all of today’s talk about the Great Depression has played a role in making economic conditions worse, by damping our “animal spirits” and making consumers and businesses more cautious than they might otherwise be. I find the argument instinctively appealing, although Shiller offers no attempt to document how big this effect might be, or even how we would know whether or not the effect exists. What’s undoubtedly true, though, is that practically every conversation these days is shadowed in one way or another by our economic woes. This isn’t a new phenomenon. In his book One-Way Street, the German social critic Walter Benjamin wrote about the bad days of the nineteen-twenties Weimar economy:

The freedom of conversation is being lost…Irresistibly intruding upon any convivial exchange is the theme of the conditions of life, of money. What this theme involves is not so much the concerns and sorrows of individuals, in which they might be able to help one another, as the overall picture. It is as if one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the events on the stage whether one wanted to or not, [and] had to make them again and again, willingly or unwillingly, the subject of one’s thought and speech.

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